Bodily sensations in social scenarios: Where in the body?

Abstract

Bodily states are fundamental to emotions emergence and are believed to constitute the first step in the chain of events that culminate in emotional awareness. Recent works have given fresh support to this view by showing that distinct topographical maps can be derived to describe how basic and more complex emotions are represented in the body. However, it is still unclear whether these bodily maps can also extend to emotions experienced specifically within social interactions and how these representations relate to basic emotions. To address this issue, we used the emBODY tool to obtain high-resolution bodily maps that represent the body activation and deactivation experienced by healthy participants in social scenarios depicting establishment or loss of social bonds. We show that clear patterns of activation/deactivation across the body emerge depending on the valence and on the characteristics of the single social scenarios, but also a common activation of head, chest and limbs across scenarios. Furthermore, we showed that maps related to complex social scenarios are strongly correlated with bodily states experienced in basic emotions, suggesting that the patterns of body activation/deactivation found for social scenarios might represent a combination of different basic emotions these experiences elicit. Our data tackle conscious emotional experiences and show for the first time how painful social events are felt on the body, providing findings that complement verbal reports and neuroimaging data on social rejection. Furthermore, they show that bodily feelings related to complex social scenarios, despite referring to unified independent emotional states, are also related to bodily correlates of basic emotions.